We have actually used the method once before about 8 years ago, and it worked like a charm.....sorta.

I say sorta because we weren't expecting what happened lol.

We opened a on-site chatroom to have something of an "online launch party" (complete with DJ that streamed live).

Now, while this "party" was going on, we had a small countdown (not file resource intensive, because it was just a countdown). So we watched as more and more...and more people started showing up to the site. If I remember correctly, it was in the area of close to 1500 - 1800 people.

The clock hit 00:00:00:00, the lights flickered (so to speak), and "GAH! Everything went down!!!" It's because the launch intro was resource intensive and was a quite large flash animation, and close to 2000 people were hitting it all at once.

So the re-launch of our HOSTING services greeted current, new, and potential customers with an oops, "page not found".

Overall however, the idea created exactly the buzz we wanted. Most people understood what happened, and we ultimately signed up 600+ of the close to 2000 people that were there. This means we increased our revenue in one night an average of $6000 per month. Considering it cost us about $300 to pull it off...it's not a bad turnaround.

and this was all based on a "Coming Soon" page with a spin